In modern wind turbine design, a continued drive for increased efficiency and reliability has led to a desire to provide more intelligent solutions for wind turbine control systems. Such solutions often involve the incorporation of wind turbine sensor systems integrated into the turbine design stage. Such systems can produce relatively accurate outputs, as they can be integrated with the manufacture of the wind turbine components, e.g. a blade deflection monitoring system inlaid within the structure of the wind turbine blade itself.
One of the challenges in ensuring accurate operation of such systems is the difficulty in ensuring accurate calibration of the sensor outputs, in particular with regard to accurate positioning of the sensor systems. In addition, it is desirable to be able to effectively verify the output of an integrated sensor system, to ensure that the sensor components are operating correctly.
Some proposed solutions include the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in order to accurately calculate the location of the sensor system and/or the wind turbine components. However, such systems are relatively expensive, and can require relatively complicated interpolation and mapping of results in order to successfully calibrate and or verify a turbine sensor system.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved turbine sensor calibration and/or verification system which provides a relatively simpler and less expensive solution, which can be easily implemented on new or existing wind turbines.